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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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Astronomy is one of my bigger interests, but I don't know about magnetic tornadoes on the sun. Is that a regular occurrence ? Is the naming a callback to regular tornadoes because they form the same way or something ? I would suppose they're magnetic fields that take on a helicoidal shape. Is that possible ?
Concerning sponges : just like coral !!
I wouldn't know... when you send me off on an interest of mine, I lose all track of social cues, and I tend to go on and on and on,....
They aren’t uncommon persey, it’s just another form of solar prominance, or material lifted above the surface by magnetic field liness. However, the tornado-like appearance rather than a full arc of material that connects to the surface in 2 places is rather uncommon, and it’s even possible that it’s an artifact of the way the sun is photographed (the lenses filter based on temperature, essentially, and material further from the surface may cool to the point it doesn’t get picked up with any of the filters, making it effectively invisible), or the angle at which the photos are taken in relation to the prominence (if we are looking at it head on, we wouldn’t see the second anchor point).
How they form is an ongoing mystery with many models, like all solar prominences, and it probably isn’t disconnected on one end like a cyclone would be, but visually it resembles a tornado, and the material does seem to rotate around the magnetic field lines, much the same way a tornado rotates in air. We see the same rotation in more typical coronal loops, which are what cause coronal mass ejections when it releases. They are absolutely massive when they do form, 10+ stacked earths in size, and can last days, weeks, months.
It’s one of my go-to water-testing facts because almost everyone likes the sun, is at least vaguely familiar with tornadoes, and can envision a “10 earth tall tornado of plasma on the sun”. Which is a damned cool image to envision - the reality is also spectacular but a bit less so.
The one linked below is actually from March this year, which is neat! I didn’t even know it happened again! This one was 14 earths high and exploded at the end of its cycle! How cool! I hope they got some really good data on how it works! I’ll have to do some looking :)
https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-video-solar-tornado-plasma-2023-3
Mesmerizing... the pictures in the article are breathtaking too. I remember looking at a real time feed of the sun as shot by a specialized telescope in southern France,-which was always pointed at the sun during the day- and learning that it rotates faster around the equator than it does near the poles. Before then, my mental picture of the sun was that of a naively solid object, like a rocky planet.
Observation biases like you mention are fascinating. Because in astronomy we can never move around to see things from an angle, or remove an obstacle from our field of view, we have to get exceedingly clever. I assume if the sun ejects matter in our direction, and then this matters gets cold, there's no way to observe it? -isn't it going to get overblown by the sheer power of the sun surface behind it?
Yeah, the coolest thing about the sun, imo, is that while a particle of light only takes a few minutes to reach earth, it can take millions of years to escape the tumultuous interior of the sun to radiate in the first place. That activity is what prevents the sun from collapsing under its own gravity.
We can’t change our earthly perspective, no, but we do have numerous satellites that do have the ability to see certain angles we can’t currently on earth. We can’t see the backside of it (from our current perspective, it rotates and we orbit so we do see all of it), really, because we’d never get good signal from our craft, but we can get some decent side angles.
We just don’t necessarily have the tools to see what we want to know with those specifically, but we put out great new tools on a regular basis, so it’s very possible they will make new tools just for that purpose.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Artificial_satellites_at_Earth-Sun_Lagrange_points
As for the other question about not being able to detect it - not really. The stuff we have focused on the sun mostly works with hot material, but the universe itself is very cold, and we can detect things from every wavelength we are aware of, it’s just a matter of what’s usually focused on the sun specifically to catch these things.
(Disclaimer for anyone who might read this: do not ever look at the sun through a telescope without a certified solar filter, you will burn out your eye. Guaranteed.) If you have a telescope, on a sunny day you can watch the sun indirectly by facing the eyepiece toward paper or a wall. It works like a projector. It’s black and white just because it’s bright out when you project it, but you can watch sunspots and stuff. :) and now is a great time to do it a we are approaching the solar maximum, when the most interesting things tend to happen.
Ah, right. (There's also the fact that we can take avantage of the parallax caused by our orbit. Just remembered.)
I guess we'd need some sort of relay if we really wanted to communicate with a craft orbiting opposite to us relative to the sun.
Whaaat ! you mean photons bounce about inside the sun for this long?? but how would we measure the time it takes for a given particle to escape it? I imagine this number comes from a theoretical model?